Workshop on Topology: Identifying order in complex systems

"I seemed to see the membraneous and cylindrical tubes tremble beneath the undulation of the waters." - Jules Verne (describing Captain Nemo's underwater garden in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) For over half a century, microscopists have seemed to...

I will demonstrate how the Cocke-Kasami-Younger (CKY) algorithm, a standard dynamic programming technique that is normally used in natural language parsing, can be adapted to give us novel insights into the protein folding problem. If we assume that...

I derive a new set of bounds on the percolation threshold of a class of continuum percolation models consisting overlapping convex hyperparticles in d-dimensional Euclidean space. The bounds converge to one another as the space dimension increases...

The number of energetically stable structures that a system of N particles can form grows exponentially with N. Stabilizing any one structure over all others is thus a challenging problem. We consider a system of N spherical colloidal particles that...

Suppose a large number of voters have each rated or compared a small subset of a large number of alternatives, how could we rank the alternatives based on these data? The rank aggregation problem is fraught with famous difficulties --- Arrow's...